The Cheat (George Abbott, 1931)

Tallulah Bankhead in The Cheat

Cast: Tallulah Bankhead, Harvey Stephens, Irving Pichel, Jay Fassett, Ann Andrews, William Ingersoll, Hanaki Yoshiwara, Willard Dashiell, Edward Keane, Robert Strange. Screenplay: Harry Hervey, based on a silent film scenario by Hector Turnbull. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Film editing: Emma Hill. 

Tallulah Bankhead is the only reason to see the cornball and somewhat racist The Cheat today. Bankhead made only a handful of films, and only one or two of them -- chiefly Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) -- are any good. The Cheat was an old Paramount property, originally directed by Cecil B. DeMille in 1915, that was dragged out of mothballs to be remade for Bankhead. She plays Elsa Carlyle, happily married to the broker Jeffrey Carlyle (Harvey Stephens), but given to spending and gambling beyond their means. Faced with a debt she can't pay, she turns to a wealthy socialite just returned from spending time in "the Orient," Hardy Livingstone (Irving Pichel). Livingstone has picked up all sorts of sinister Asian artifacts and manners, and keeps dolls representing his sexual conquests in a cabinet. He brands the dolls with his own insignia. It soon becomes clear that he plans to add an effigy of Elsa to his collection, and when she spurns his advances he brands her, too, with a hot iron applied just above her breast. (Some production stills and posters show Bankhead baring a shoulder instead of her chest.) She shoots Livingstone, but only wounds him, and when Carlyle arrives, followed by the police, he claims to have fired the pistol. A trial ensues. Even contemporary reviewers found the movie old-fashioned and noted that the audiences laughed in all the wrong places. There's some impressive camerawork directed by George J. Folsey, but also a rather kitschy Thai-Balinese dance number choreographed by Ruth St. Denis. Bankhead does what she can with the material, which isn't enough, and she and director George Abbott returned to Broadway, where they had more success. 

Forever Amber (Otto Preminger, 1947)

Linda Darnell and George Sanders in Forever Amber

Cast: Linda Darnell, Cornel Wilde, Richard Greene, George Sanders, Glenn Langan, Richard Haydn, Jessica Tandy, Anne Revere, John Russell, Jane Ball, Robert Coote, Leo G. Carroll, Margaret Wycherly. Screenplay: Philip Dunne, Ring Lardner Jr., Jerome Cady, based on a novel by Kathleen Winsor. Cinematography: Leon Shamroy. Art direction: Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: David Raksin. 

Once a famous "dirty book," Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber wouldn't raise eyebrows or blood pressures in the average book club of today, but it was one of Hollywood's hottest properties in the 1940s. The bidding war was won by 20th Century Fox, which followed the example of Gone With the Wind by announcing a search for the actress who would play the glamorously wicked Amber St. Clair. Though the part originally went to Peggy Cummins, producer Darryl F. Zanuck finally decided that she looked too young to play the mature Amber, and when she was sidelined by illness just as filming began, she was replaced by Linda Darnell. John Stahl, the original director, left the film at the same time, and Otto Preminger stepped in. He disliked the book and asked for a script rewrite, but Preminger also delighted in trying to get things past the censors, who were all over the project. The result is a middling costume drama with too much material from the book to fit comfortably in its two-hour run time. Amber is an ambitious lass raised in a Puritan household who, when Charles II is restored to the throne, latches on to a handsome Cavalier, Bruce Carlton (Cornel Wilde), and heads for London. When Carlton is commissioned as a privateer by the king (George Sanders) and sets sail, Amber, who is pregnant with Carlton's child, is left with a little money that gets swindled away from her and lands in Newgate, the debtors' prison. She gives birth, escapes from prison, makes a living by thievery, goes on stage, attracts the eye of the king, marries an elderly earl, nurses a returned Carlton through the plague, inherits the earl's fortune when he dies during the Great Fire, and becomes the king's mistress. All of this immoral behavior should mean, under the Production Code, that she gets punished accordingly, but somehow the movie manages to finesse that with only a little emotional stress at the end. Forever Amber got condemned by the Catholic church banned in a few places, but it was evidently bowdlerized enough to survive and make money. The truth is, it's a little dull. It comes to life occasionally when Sanders is on screen being royally wicked, but Darnell, with a blonde dye job and wig, never gets a chance to do more than be cautiously wicked and suffer prettily. The Technicolor is also rather dark and muddy, although that may be the result of an aging print. 
 

Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr., 1989)

Wendell B. Harris Jr. in Chameleon Street

Cast: Wendell B. Harris Jr., Timothy Alvaro, William Ballenger, Thomas Bashaw, Alfred Bruce Bradley, Margaret Branch, Rick Davenport, Amina Fakir, Anita Gordon, Gary Irwin, Jeff Lamb, Angela Leslie, Bruce Seyburn, Jennifer Turner. Screenplay: Wendell B. Harris Jr. Cinematography: Daniel S. Noga. Art direction: Timothy Alvaro. Film editing: Matthew Mallinson. Music: Peter S. Moore.

 An altogether astonishing movie, Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street is raw, clumsy, funny, mordant, and almost as interesting for what happened to the movie itself as for anything that happens on the screen. It was born of its writer-producer-director-star's fascination with a real life con man, William Douglas Street Jr., who managed to pass himself off as a reporter, a doctor, a lawyer, an athlete, and a Yale student. Only once did Street try to make real money with this talent; the rest of the time he did it because he could, which ultimately wound up sending him to prison. Harris's exploration of Street's career is a kind of docudrama, and it won him the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. What it didn't win him was fame as a filmmaker, which Sundance had done for directors like Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Steven Soderbergh, among others. Hollywood showed its interest only in buying the rights to remake the movie, but not to distribute it. At the Sundance festival, Chameleon Street's chief competitor for the award was To Sleep With Anger, a film by another Black director, Charles Burnett, that was picked up for distribution by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. It's a more conventional movie, featuring stars like Danny Glover, while Harris's film is largely performed by non-professional actors. After three decades of underground circulation, Chameleon Street was restored in 2021, distributed and released on video. It can now be seen as a pointed look at the Black experience and as a commentary on the quest for identity and status, not only within the film but in the film's history. 

Blood for Dracula (Paul Morrissey, 1974)

Udo Kier in Blood for Dracula

Cast: Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro, Arno Jürging, Vittorio De Sica, Maxime McKendry, Milena Vukotic, Dominique Darel, Stefania Casini, Silvia Dionisio. Screenplay: Paul Morrissey. Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller. Production design: Enrico Job. Film editing: Jed Johnson, Franca Silvi. Music: Claudio Gizzi. 

The great Vittorio De Sica had a career that extended from the sublime -- directing Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1954), acting in Madame De ... (Max Ophus, 1953) -- to the ridiculous -- appearing in Paul Morrissey's Blood for Dracula. De Sica plays the Marchese Di Fiore, an Italian aristocrat in financial straits who lives in a decaying mansion with his wife (Maxime McKendry) and four daughters. He has been forced to dismiss all of his servants except one, the surly Mario Balato (Joe Dallesandro), a Marxist who eagerly anticipates a revolution like the one that has just taken place in Russia. Di Fiore's only hope is to marry off one of his daughters to a wealthy suitor. The oldest, Esmeralda (Milena Vukotic), and the youngest, Perla (Silivia Dionisio), are considered not suitable, but the two middle girls, Saphiria (Dominique Darel) and Rubinia (Stefania Casini) are prime marriage material. So who should arrive in their village but a well-to-do Romanian count named Dracula (Udo Kier). In this version of the Dracula story, the count can drink only the blood of virgins. The villagers back in Romania have gotten wise to this fact, and no women go near his castle. So he figures that the Italians, being devout Roman Catholics, will have seen to it that virginity prevails, so he journeys there with his assistant, Anton (Arno Jürging), in search of a bride. He's delighted to learn of Di Fiore's marriageable daughters, so he makes a play for the girls, only to discover that neither is a virgin -- Mario has seen to that. Sampling his would-be brides makes the count violently ill, giving Kier an opportunity to go over the top in portraying Dracula's reaction. The film is about what you'd expect if you've seen its companion piece, Morrissey's Flesh for Frankenstein (1973): a good deal of nudity on the part of the actresses and Dallesandro, some bloody deaths, a lot of barely acceptable acting, and a wide variety of accents: Italian, German, French, British, and Brooklyn. De Sica, who wrote his own dialogue, makes his character one of the saving graces of the movie, along with cinematography, settings, and a score that are better than it deserves.    

Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)

James Woods and Debbie Harry in Videodrome

Cast: James Woods, Debbie Harry, Sonja Smits, Peter Dvorsky, Leslie Carlson, Jack Creley, Lynne Gorman, Julie Khaner, Reiner Schwarz, David Bolt, Rena King. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Art direction: Carol Spear. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

The menacing technology in Videodrome -- cathode ray tube TV sets, video cassettes (Betamax!), broadcast television -- looks antique and even quaint 40 years later. We worry today about the internet, smart phones, social media. But the root fear remains the same: extreme self-absorption, alienation, anomie. In that respect, David Cronenberg's fable has dated not at all. Partly that's because as a specialist in "body horror," Cronenberg, with the significant help of makeup artist Rick Baker, is able to translate psychological, even spiritual concerns into physical ones. The grotesque invasions of the body in Videodrome are treated as invasions of the soul. If I have reservations about the movie, it's that it too quickly pins the blame on television instead of exploring the root causes of the hunger for violence and violent sex that the medium exploits. It's like deploring consumerism while ignoring capitalism's encouragement of it. But that's another film entirely, or rather a whole bunch of films. 

Ned Rifle (Hal Hartley, 2014)

Aubrey Plaza in Ned Rifle

Cast: Liam Aiken, Aubrey Plaza, Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Thomas Jay Ryan, Martin Donovan, Karen Sillas, Robert John Burke. Melissa Bithorn, Gia Crovatin, Bill Sage, Lloyd Kaufman. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Vladimir Subotic. Production design: Richard Sylvarnes. Film editing: Kyle Gilman. Music: Hal Hartley. 

And so ends the saga of Henry Fool that began in his eponymous film in 1997. Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) is known as usual mainly through his effect on others, primarily the Grim family but also -- in Fay Grim (2006) -- the international espionage community. He has sent two of the Grims, Fay (Parker Posey) and Simon (James Urbaniak), to prison because of their association with him. And now a third, his son, Ned (Liam Aiken), who has taken the surname Rifle, bears a grudge because of what happened to his mother, Fay, and his uncle Simon. He has reached the age of 18, having gone to live with a devoutly Christian family -- the Rev. Daniel Gardner (Martin Gardner) and his wife,  Alice (Karen Sillas) -- since his mother was sentenced to life in prison as a terrorist. (Yes, to understand that you have to watch Fay Grim.) For those who have watched his films, it seems like the gang of Hartley regulars is all here. But there's a newcomer: Aubrey Plaza, who plays Susan Weber, a young woman who seems to be obsessed with the Grims. She's a graduate student at Columbia who's helping Fay write her memoirs, and she did a thesis (which was rejected) on Simon's Nobel Prize-winning poetry. But what she really wants to do is track down Henry -- she has her reasons, which we will learn. Susan crosses paths with Ned when he goes to see his uncle, also trying to find Henry, whom he wants to kill, despite the earnest Christian faith that he has adopted. The rest is a working out of motifs drawn from previous Hartley films, and not just the first two in the trilogy. There's also an echo of Hartley's short film The Book of Life (1998) in which Donovan played Jesus and Ryan played the devil: In Ned Rifle Henry is under psychiatric care because he is pretending that he believes he's the devil. But I think Henry Fool is really a variation on Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's self-made man who isn't what he seems and eventually meets his end because of the charismatic spell he casts on other people. Plaza is terrific and the rest of the cast is in great form. 

Frankenhooker (Frank Henenlotter, 1990)

Patty Mullen in Frankenhooker

Cast: James Lorinz, Patty Mullen, Joanne Ritchie, Paul-Felix Montez, Joseph Gonzalez, J.J. Clark, Gregory Martin, Carissa Channing, Shirl Bernheim, Hannah York, Helmar Augustus Cooper, Heather Hunter, Louise Lasser. Screenplay: Robert Martin, Frank Henenlotter. Cinematography: Robert M. Baldwin. Production design: Charles C. Bennett. Film editing: Kevin Tent. Music: Joe Renzetti. 

Mary Shelley's monster -- by which I mean the novel, not the creature in it -- has undergone so many dismemberings and reassemblages over two centuries that I doubt she would recognize it today. I certainly don't want to speculate about what she would think of Frankenhooker, which carries the premise of reanimating the dead to its sleaziest extreme. When Jeffrey Franken's (James Lorinz) fiancée, Elizabeth Shelley (Patty Mullen), dies in an accident that leaves him only her head, he takes what he has learned in the med schools he flunked out of and the equipment he has "borrowed" from his job in an electrical power plant, and sets out to collect other body parts with a view to reconstructing and reviving her. He finds the parts he needs on the women walking the seedier streets of Manhattan. How he collects them and how the plan goes awry involves, among other things, some explosive crack cocaine and a vengeful pimp. Yes, the movie is in the worst possible taste, with something to offend almost anyone. The acting is atrocious and the special effects are, let's say, marginal. But it's also some kind of classic -- cult or camp or exploitation, you label it. I can only say that if you don't laugh out loud at least once, you may need to reanimate yourself. 

Meanwhile (Hal Hartley, 2011)

D.J. Mendel in Meanwhile

Cast: D.J. Mendel, Danielle Meyer, Chelsea Crowe, Miho Nikaido, Penelope Lagos, Lisa Hickman, James David Rich, Hoji Fortuna, Kanstance Frakes, Scott Shepherd, Christine Holt, Stephen Ellis, Soraya Soi Free. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Daniel Sharnoff. Production design: Richard Sylvarnes. Film editing: Kyle Gilman. Music: Hal Hartley.

The knock on Hal Hartley's Meanwhile from, for example, the commenters on IMDb, is that it's just a guy wandering around talking to people. Which could, I suppose, be said of James Joyce's Ulysses. Not that Meanwhile, with its slightly less than an hour run time, bears extended comparison with Joyce's mock-epic tour of Dublin. But it does have something of that novel's semi-affectionate take on a city, in Hartley's case New York. Joseph (D.J. Mendel) is an ordinary Joe in the way that Leopold Bloom was an ordinary man, which means that you wouldn't take a second look at him in a crowd but if you took time to observe him you'd discover multiple ways in which he's unique. Hartley intercuts Joseph's peregrinations with apparently irrelevant scenes in which a worker in his own office at his production company, Possible Films, picks up an advance copy of a novel titled Meanwhile, a big fat book that she takes home and apparently reads. But what we have here isn't a novel; it's a New Yorker short story. Nothing is concluded but everything is potential. For me that was enough to savor and appreciate. 

Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey, 1932)

Bela Lugosi in Murders in the Rue Morgue

Cast: Bela Lugosi, Sidney Fox, Leon Ames, Bert Roach, Betty Ross Clarke, Brandon Hurst, D'Arcy Corrigan, Noble Johnson, Arlene Francis. Screenplay: Robert Florey, Tom Reed, Dale Van Every, John Huston, based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Milton Carruth. 

Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue Morgue looks great, thanks to Karl Freund's cinematography and Charles D. Hall's atmospheric sets, which were designed in collaboration with an uncredited Herman Rosse. Freund in particular brought his experience as cinematographer on such classics of German expressionism as F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) to the task of re-creating the seamy side of Paris in 1845. Unfortunately, Florey was a comparative novice as a director, and the pacing of the movie is all wrong, static when it should be dynamic, with performances stuck in that peculiarly halting way of early talkies. There are supposedly comic scenes that fall flat: the byplay between the hero, a medical student called Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames) and his friend Paul (Bert Roach), and a routine involving three witnesses to a murder, a German, an Italian, and a Dane, each adhering to an ethnic stereotype. Only Bela Lugosi, as the sinister (what else?) Dr. Mirakle, gives his character any life. Dr. Mirakle is a carnival showman whose act centers on a gorilla called Erik (sometimes played by a chimpanzee and sometimes by the actor Charles Gamora in an ape suit). The doctor believes he can talk with Erik and wants to breed him with a human woman, so with the aid of his assistant Janos (Noble Johnson) he kidnaps streetwalkers, one of whom is played in her film debut by Arlene Francis, now mostly remembered as a panelist in the old game show What's My Line? After failing to find a compatible blood-type (and killing the women in the process) he finds his perfect subject: the pretty Camille (Sidney Fox), whom he spots in the audience at his show with her boyfriend, Pierre. You can guess the rest. Murders in the Rue Morgue has the makings of the best Universal horror classics, but it failed on its initial run. Critics panned the performances, with the exception of Lugosi's. Censors objected to the violence, the depiction of prostitution, and some belly-dancers in the sideshow, and some even to the endorsement of the theory of evolution. It was trimmed from its reported release time of 75 minutes to just over an hour. But it retains some exceptionally creepy moments, and its exciting end sequence anticipates and perhaps even influenced King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933).   

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley, 2006)

Parker Posey in Fay Grim

Cast: Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Liam Aiken, Jeff Goldblum, Chuck Montgomery, Leo Fitzpatrick, Saffron Burrows, Jasmine Tabatabai, Elina Löwensohn, Thomas Jay Ryan, Anatole Taubman. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Sarah Cawley. Production design: Richard Sylvarnes. Film editing: Hal Hartley. Music: Hal Hartley.  

Fay Grim (Parker Posey) is having a bad day: Her husband is missing, her brother is in prison, and her son is about to be kicked out of school. Soon this will look like one of the better days. Fay Grim is another of Hal Hartley's ventures into subverting a genre, particularly the espionage thriller. But it's also filtered through another genre, one you might call "the Sandra Bullock movie." At least I call it that because it brought to mind the last Sandra Bullock movie I saw, The Last City (Adam Nee, Aaron Nee, 2022), in which she plays a woman who gets swept up into an unexpected adventure. Bullock is not the only actress who lands in that kind of film, but she's been the prototypical heroine of them since her breakthrough movie, Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994). In Fay Grim Posey fits the part as well as or even better than Bullock. It's nominally a sequel to Henry Fool (1997), in which Hal Hartley introduced us to Fay, her brother, Simon (James Urbaniak), and the enigmatic Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan). All you need to know from that film is that Fay and Henry had a son, Ned (Liam Aiken), and that Simon went to prison because he helped Henry flee the country to avoid a murder rap. Now, an Agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) from the CIA is suddenly in touch with Fay to see if she knows the whereabouts of the notebooks Henry kept. He claimed to be writing a sort of confessional novel that publishers had told him was unpublishable. Henry is dead, Fulbright tells her, but the notebooks may have significance no one has previously suspected. And so begins an elaborate chase that takes Fay to Paris and Istanbul, and involves Simon (whom she gets sprung from prison) and Ned (who receives a mysterious clue in the mail), as well as a lot of intelligence agents and terrorists from all over Europe and the Middle East. Fay Grim becomes as intrepid as Jason Bourne or James Bond in the process. Posey's performance holds it all together and makes me wonder why she's not as big a star as Bullock. It's fun to see some of these characters again, but by wading so deeply into spy spoof territory Hartley has lost the control that made Henry Fool such a fresh new start for his career, and some of his recently acquired mannerisms -- like the tilted camera, the so-called "Dutch angle" -- are tiresome.